Vikram's axe howled through the air like a beast unchained.
Each swing was wild, unpolished, more desperation than discipline. He didn't care. He swung not to fight, but to feel. To draw out something buried within the marrow of his bones. The echoes of battle rang across the stone chamber, but his mind was already drifting, already thinking of the next trial.
The Second Walk, as Brunus had called it.
And that single flicker of thought cost him.
In a blink, pain bloomed. A blade buried itself into his left eye.
There was no time to scream, no moment to retaliate. Darkness swallowed him whole.
Then… stillness.
And just like that, Vikram opened his eyes once more, alive, whole, inside the cave again. The respawn had become second nature to him now. The cycle of death and return, pain and awakening, again and again.
He checked his status.
[Realm: None (Supreme Foundation)]
Normally, he would have rushed toward Adthal Village. the moment he revived. But this time, something felt different. He sat down cross-legged on the stone floor, eyes shut tight, and took a long breath.
Then he ignited his Primal Blood.
The moment he did, his veins flared with heat. His circulatory system turned into a torrent of violence. It wasn't pain that he felt. It was something deeper. His body trembled under the strain, but his soul felt clear. Awakened.
The Breath of the Crimson Pulse roared to life within him.
Each breath was fire.
Each beat of his heart was a hammer striking iron.
He wasn't merely circulating energy. He was attempting something insane, leaping straight into the Major Accomplishment realm of the technique in one stroke.
It should have been impossible.
But Vikram had what most lacked: a Supreme Foundation.
According to the Journal, forming such a foundation required no talent, no fortune, no divine blessing. Only time. Relentless time spent allowing the embryonic Primal Blood to slowly, agonizingly, temper the body. It was a process so rare and so slow that most cultivators abandoned it entirely. Ten, sometimes twenty years of washing one's flesh with primal essence, only to end up too old to continue cultivating.
The few who did succeed often paid for it with their future.
And yet Vikram, through cruel fortune and unnatural means, had it. He had built his Supreme Foundation not over decades, but through sheer anomaly. His body had been nurtured by the strange statue that consumed fragmented souls and returned divinity in liquid form.
A god's nectar, almost.
It had accelerated the process in ways even the Journal didn't dare theorize.
Now, seated in stillness, Vikram pushed the Primal Blood through his channels with a fury that scorched him from the inside out. The howling of blood was deafening. He could hear nothing else.
Could feel nothing else.
His skin turned red.
His vision blurred.
And then,
CRACK
And in the very next instant, his body ruptured.
Blood erupted from every inch of his flesh as if his veins had forgotten their purpose. His skin split open in dozens of places, and crimson gushed forth in violent torrents. It was not a wound or an injury, it was a collapse. A complete rejection of form, as though his body no longer recognized itself.
It was horrifying.
The ground around him darkened as the blood pooled fast and thick, soaking into the stone like a sacrifice offered to something ancient.
Yet Vikram… remained still.
Amidst the tearing of muscle, the grotesque convulsions of a body unraveling, and the rain of his own blood, his expression barely shifted. His eyes, heavy with strain, cracked open beneath the deluge. They flickered with dim awareness, as if staring through the pain rather than at it.
His breathing slowed, not from panic, but from discipline.
There was no scream. No struggle. Just calm.
Then, he silently fell down on that cave.
[You have been slain.]
Vikram woke up, eyes heavy with the weight of another failure. The ceiling of the stone cavern stared back at him, silent and unmoved. He sat up slowly, the soreness in his limbs less from battle and more from frustration that had begun to settle into his bones.
He didn't know what to do anymore.
He had been trying for what felt like an eternity, pushing, hammering, burning through his veins in pursuit of a single, perfect breakthrough. And yet, no matter how fiercely he reached, the threshold refused to budge. That one perfect stroke, the instant elevation into mastery, remained a dream just out of reach.
So he stopped chasing it.
Maybe, he thought, it was time to take baby steps.
His breath left him in a slow exhale, and he let the thought hang.
Maybe some things aren't meant to be defied... or maybe, he thought with a dry smile, I'm just not the protagonist of this story.
The cave offered no answer.
Vikram opened his eyes and stood. Around him stretched the boundless realm that had been gifted to him—or perhaps, cursed upon him. Jagged peaks pierced distant clouds. Rivers of light flowed through broken canyons. It was a world painted in myth, shaped by forces beyond mortal comprehension.
He looked at it all and shook his head.
"If this doesn't scream protagonist," he muttered under his breath, lips curling into a crooked grin, "then I really don't know what would."
CRACK
It felt like a dam shattering inside his body.
A surge of something ancient flooded his veins, and his embryonic Primal Blood doubled, roaring through him with terrifying vitality. His skin flushed crimson, his muscles trembled, and for a moment, he looked less like a man and more like a myth. A crimson asura cloaked in the essence of war.
Vikram's eyes snapped open, and a brilliant flare of bloody light burst from within them. His breath steamed in the cold air.
A breakthrough.
A moment later, a screen emerged.
[Techniques:]
• Axe Throwing Technique (Entry Level)
• Breath of the Crimson Pulse (Minor Accomplishment)(!)
• Ironbreaker's Axe Form (Entry Level)
Even as his body still pulsed with the aftershocks of the transformation, Vikram slowly rose to his feet. His breath was steady now, but there was a coiled storm beneath the surface, his veins still thrummed with the rhythm of something new, something alive.
He opened his status screen, gave it a brief glance, and closed it without a word.
There was nothing more to see. He knew what he had become.
The Supreme Foundation was his. And with it, the chains that once shackled his potential had snapped clean. The statue of the woman, whatever strange god or remnant she had been, had gifted him something most cultivators spent their lives chasing in vain.
With the Supreme Foundation now rooted in his bones, the Breath of the Crimson Pulse flowed through him like second nature. Each inhalation carried power. Each exhalation carried purpose.
And it didn't stop there.
Any technique from the Body Path or the Barbarian Lineage would now meld into his physique like iron into fire. His body would no longer resist. It would welcome. It would adapt. It would devour.
He could even layer them, two, three techniques fused into one vessel. His vessel.
The thought alone made something within him stir.
A faint light bled from his pupils, deep, red, and ominous. His axe, long silent, now shimmered with that same bloody hue, as if drinking from the well of his newfound might.
Vikram's face slowly bloomed into a relaxed smile. Not one of joy.
Of certainty.
"Time to vent, I guess."